This year will be even more `mobile’ then 2012 with 900 million plus mobile phones out there. A Nielsen NM Incite study reveals that 46% of all social media users use their smartphones to access their favorite social networks and 16% use their tablets for the same.

Plus content that’s hot out of the oven. Your brand, your company is doing things every day. Your content should consist of news, updates, or content from the brands universe that touches relevant and recognizable touch points with the consumer.

Keep the hot news ready to be served as it comes. On your website, in the social space, and all findable on search engines.

6. Breaking Digital Clutter Will Get Tougher

With more brands and corporate realizing the power of the web, they are all out there doing there SEO, SMO, Website updates, etc. etc. The digital clutter will only increase. Getting the audience to engage with you will not be easy. Getting them to click on your link will depend ultimately on what you have to offer. Refer point 5.

7. On-set of Real Time Marketing & Internal/External Communications

Yes, we know we can do real time media planning and buying. But what is going to be even more exciting is real time marketing. Buyers are engaging real time on company websites and social media with the sellers, and in every product segment. What’s more digital is becoming all pervasive. So it’s use is not just restricted to marketing any more but PR, sales, CRM, corporate communication, et al.

Brand pages on Facebook get posts that relate to purchase enquiries, and on another extreme even employees or hired help talking about low wages! CXOs have to say goodbye to advance campaign planning and traditional modes of interactions, and look at nimble-footed communication plans.

8. Importance of Off Page SEO Will Increase Thanks To Social Media

With increase in social linkages, sharing, fragmentation and spread of what is being said about your brand, your off page optimization has to be robust. Linking, monitoring, seeding content, targeting influencers and addressing the audience where they are will increasingly start counting for your Page Rank on search engines.

9. Contextual Content Marketing Will Emerge

Serving the right content in the right context of what your customer is seeking will become increasingly important. More and more `targeted marketing’ will be the name of the game.

10. Marketing Will Become More Human

A face to the voice that speaks will become increasingly important. Be it the profile of who is tweeting on behalf of your company, or the CEO’s blog or twitter account or the way you respond to your audience on twitter. A face adds credibility and the audience will increasingly look for this credibility in a highly competitive environment.

11. Opt-In Email Lists Can Give A Marketing Edge

Email is not out, email is in, we check it everyday. We click on offers from mailing lists, we read articles that interest us in the weekly news digests we subscribe to, we click on links forwarded to us via email. Smart marketers will focus on building these email lists and getting the consumer coming back for more regularly. The bigger and better your list, and better the targeting you do with it, the better your marketing returns.

12. Lead Generation Budgets Will Shift To Digital

As opposed to 2 per cent response rate in mass media marketing, digital media marketing can give 10 per cent or even higher responses. Topping this is the fact that you pay only for media that delivered, CPC (cost per click) deals are dominating digital media spends. What’s more you can control what you want to spend for the lead.

13. Device Agnostic & Device Independent

Be it through responsive design or sheer investment in content that can be served for multiple screens, marketers will realize the need to invest in either or. While compatibility across screens is any digital content designer’s dream, it will take a while. Not in 2013 at least.

Leaders of all types must have at least a high-level understanding of how social and digital technologies work. Even if your corporation is not pursuing the digital media, social and new technology – opportunities there are possibilities of unavoidable challenges and risks. Either posed by your end-consumer who has adopted these, or by the competition.

It appears that in a bid to become advertiser friendly, and get closer to delivering ROI, Facebook has introduced Offers. With this option, brands can now provide exclusive offers to their Facebook fans via status updates. Facebook evidently also hopes that these posts will be further promoted by brands to reach a larger audience.

This is how it appears on the page next to Status Updates:

The way in which you post an offer further has 3 options:

This appears to be in beta as not all brand pages have it, so don’t be surprised if your brand page is not showing up this option. May be you could contact your Facebook relationship manager to get this enabled for you.

The brands we stumbled across using this feature is the etailer brand Fashionandyou.com and firstcry.com on its fan page.

Once a fan avails of an offer, you get further visibility as their engagement becomes known to their friends.

Clearly Facebook is exploring newer and relevant means to appeal to the brands that are using its platform to engage with an audience, and hoping that these measures will help to increase advertising spends on the social network. After all with General Motors announcing that it was pulling out of Facebook, did send ripples in the market questioning Facebook’s advertising’s efficacy.

We read about it, but then today we stumbled on it on our brand page. The Facebook’s ‘Promote’ feature that has been introduced to your status updates. For as less as USD 5 you can have your status update reach out to as many as 2500 Facebook users! The feature is similar to Promote a Tweet, only here seems to work quick and fast with the click and buy views model built in to the status update bar.

Facebooks Promote Feature

The feature is sure to bring in newer types of advertisers into Facebook folds, individuals, smaller companies and even large brands with big campaigns who want to quickly reach out with an update to a larger audience rather than get into a complete campaign management program with sponsored stories, premium ads or buying Facebook fans/likes.

Our thumbs to this new feature from Facebook that allows specific messaging (your latest wall posts or status updates) to reach out to a larger audience than an average status update would, and also for the user friendly and simple mechanics. Would be good to see Facebook add features such as targeting to the Promote tool.